There's the orthopedic surgeon whose inattention to a man's fractured thighbone resulted in a leg amputation. Robert Oshel, former associate director for research and disputes at the National Practitioner Data Bank 'You can find out more about the safety record of your toaster and whether or not it's going to catch on fire than you can find about your physicians.' Read some of the probationary settlements, all signed by the doctors and their lawyers, and it becomes clear why this matters: We also filed a public records request and were able to obtain California'sĮntire database of doctors on probation as of late September, information that is now searchable on our Safe Patient Project website.Ĭonsumer Reports' deep dive into California's records brings this important issue into sharp focus. The board rejected the idea, saying it would put too much of a burden on doctors and damage the doctor-patient relationship. Last fall in California, the state with the most doctors, Consumer Reports petitioned the medical board to do just that. "Doctors on probation should be required to tell their patients of their status." "The onus shouldn't be on patients to investigate their physicians," says Lisa McGiffert, who directs the effort. Through our Safe Patient Project, Consumer Reports is working to change the way the system works around the country. Here's the problem: Even in a time when vast amounts of information sit at the end of our fingertips, it's still too difficult for consumers to find a doctor's disciplinary record and its causes. Though the odds are quite good that your doctor isn't one of them, it's important to know for sure. Thousands of working physicians are currently being disciplined by their respective state medical boards for findings that patients may want to know about–things such as sexual misconduct, their own addiction problems, overprescribing controlled substances, and all sorts of other documented examples of unprofessional or dangerous doctoring. You might think a doctor with that type of record would be barred from practicing medicine, but that didn't happen in this case. Both were young mothers who had recently given birth to healthy babies. The report makes the case of how his errors of medical knowledge, judgment, protocol, and attentiveness contributed to the deaths of two patients. The good ovary was missing, and the cystic one was still inside her. The report describes the time Kurian surgically removed the wrong ovary from a 37-year-old woman, a mistake the patient only learned about weeks later when, still in pain, she went for more tests. The state medical board's report on Leonard Kurian, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Southern California, tells in stark clinical detail what it says happened to several patients in his care. are on medical probation for reasons including drug abuse, sexual misconduct, and making careless-sometimes deadly-mistakes.
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